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MISS ELSA AND MISS SOPHY by Peter F. Drucker

Adventures of a Bystander ()

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John Wiley & Sons

MISS ELSA AND MISS SOPHY by Peter F. Drucker

I have observed a good many first-rate teachers in action, and even a few great ones. I myself was taught only by two classroom teachers I would consider first-rate: Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, both of whom I encountered in fourth grade. And they were not just good, they were outstanding Yet they failed to teach me what both they and I knew I needed to learn.

Miss Elsa, the principal of the school, was our home-room teacher, with whom we worked four hours every day six days a week—for we had school on Saturday, even though we were dismissed earlier. When the school year started, in September, Miss Elsa told us that we would have two to three weeks of quizzes and tests to see how much we knew. This sounded frightening but turned out to be fun. For Miss Elsa made us grade ourselves or grade each other. At the end of three weeks, she had an individual conference with each of us. “Sit down next to me,” she would say, “and tell me what you think you do well.” I told her, “And now,” she said, “tell me what you do badly. “ “Yes,” she said, “you are right, you read well. In fact reading rats like you don’t need work reading, and I haven’t scheduled any for you, You keep on reading what you want to read. Only, Peter, make sure that you have good light and don’t strain your eyes. You’re reading under the desk when you think I’m not looking; always read on top of the desk. I am moving you to a desk next to the big window so that you have enough light. And you spell well and don’t need any spelling drill. Only learn to look up words and don’t guess when you don’t know. And, “she added, “you know you left out one of your strengths—you know what it is?” I shook my head. “Your are very good in composition, but you haven’t had enough practice. Do you agree?” I nodded. “All right, let’s make that a goal. Let’s say you write two compositions a week, one for which you tell me what you want to write about, one for which I give you a topic. And,” she continued, “you underrate your performance in arithmetic, You are actually good—so good that I would propose that this year you learn all the arithmetic the lower grades teach, that is, fractions, percentages, and logarithms —you’ll like logarithms, they’re clever. Then you’ll be ready to do the mathematics they teach in the upper grades, geometry and algebra.”

I was surprised, for I knew I was doing poorly in arithmetic and had, indeed, always been criticized by earlier teachers. I said so. “Of course, “she replied. “Your results are poor. But not because you don’t know arithmetic. They are poor because you are terribly sloppy and don’t check. You don’t make more mistakes than the others; you just don’t catch. So you’ll learn this year how to check—and to make sure you do, I’ll ask you to check all the arithmetic work of the five children sitting in your row and the row ahead of you. But, Peter, you aren’t just “poor” in handwriting, as you think you are. You’re total disgrace, and I won’t have it in my class. It’s going to hamper you. You like to write, but then no one can read what you’ve written. It’s quite unnecessary; you can write a decent hand. By the end of the year you’ll write like this.” She whipped out two pieces of paper and put them in front of me. One was a composition I had written; and while the first line was legible, though hardly great calligraphy, the second had already deteriorated into an illegible scrawl. The second sheet of paper carried the same composition, word for word, but in the handwriting of my first line, legible throughout. “This,” said Miss Elsa, pointing to the second sheet, “is how you will write by the end of the year. This is the hand you can and should develop. Don’t try to write the way I do”—how she knew I had hoped to do exactly that, I cannot even guess. “Everybody has to write his own hand, and this is yours.”

“You agree?” she asked. I did. “Then,” she went on, “let’s put it down so that you and I know exactly what you are doing. Here are your workbooks—one for each month, and I’ll keep an exact copy of each in my desk. See, I haven’t put down any goals for you in reading and spelling. But I have given you enough space so that you can put down, if you wish, what you have read, what it was all about, how you liked it, whether you plan to reread it, and what you learned from it.

People who read as much as you will always do often like to do that. You will record each week what compositions you wrote and make sure you write two each week. And here is the arithmetic page. It has two sections: one for quizzes on stuff you already know—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division; one for the new skills: fractions first. Put down each week at the beginning how you expect to do and then how you are actually doing. And here is the handwriting plan. I think you might try each week to write one more line in your compositions in your best, most legible, hand—that shouldn’t be asking too much of yourself, I imagine.

“Once a week you and I will look at this together. Of course, come and ask me any time you have a question, and you keep your copy of your books. A little later on, if you want to, you may keep mine too—it would help me if you were willing to do that. There are so many children in the room and I also run the whole school and am quite busy.”

Miss Sophy taught arts and crafts, to which we devoted one and a half hours each day. She resided in a big, crowded, colorful studio room, which no one ever saw her leave. One side was fixed up for the arts, with easels, crayons, brushes, watercolors, ,and clay, and with lots of colored gummed paper for cutting out—this was before fingerpaints. Another side was the craft shop, with child-size sewing machines (with foot treadles, of course, if only to make them more attractive to children), and long rows of hand tools, saws, pliers, drills, hammers, and planes in a small but complete woodworking shop. And along a third wall were pots and pans, burners, and a big sink

For three weeks Miss Sophy would let us try things, always willing to help but never offering advice or criticism. Then she said to me: “You aren’t much interested in painting or modeling in clay, are you?” “I’m not good at it,” was my reply. “No, you certainly aren’t. But by the end of this year you will be able to use simple hand tools. How about starting out by making a milking stool for your mother?” I was somewhat taken aback. “We don’t have any cows,” I stammered. “Why would my mother want a milking stool?” “Because it’s about the only thing you could possibly make,” said Miss Sophy tartly. Then answer made sense to me, though I doubted whether I could indeed even make a milking stool.

Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy were sisters. A third sister, Miss Clara, taught the fifth grade, the highest grade in Austrian elementary schools. They were as unlike each other as three middle-aged spinsters could be. Clara was built like a Prussian grenadier—broad-shouldered, raw-boned and very tall—she towered over most men. Elsa was middle-sized and plump and dowdy. Sophy was tiny—most fourth-graders looked down on her. Miss Elsa was the youngest—probably three years younger than Miss Clara and five or six years younger than Miss Sophy. At the time when I encountered Miss Elsa in fourth grade, she was in her mid-or late forties and had been principal of the school ever since it had started, twelve years earlier as the elementary and coeducational department of the Schwarzwald enterprises. She was the complete caricature of the schoolmarm-spinster. Clad in shiny black—something called, I believe bombazine, and extinct by now, I hope—that only showed a little white around the neck and the wrists, she looked like a big beetle. Her dress billowed out in front but was so tight over her buttocks that it crackled ominously whenever she bent for-ward. On a long black ribbon she wore a pince-nez which never left her nose but always stood askew. And she wore “sensible” high-button shoes.

But she had absolute authority. She would be writing on the blackboard and say quietly without turning her head: “Peter Drucker, stop pulling Libby Brunner’s pigtails”; or “Peter Drucker, who gave you permission to walk around? Go back to your seat immediately.” We debated for hours how she did it. The rationalists in the class were convinced that she must have a mirror in her hand—or perhaps there was one hidden in the blackboard. But though we searched the blackboard endlessly and all but took it to pieces, we could never find one. The mystics in the class endowed her with magical powers—or at least with eyes in the back of her head, under the meager mouse-colored braids that she wore tightly coiled up on top of her head. She never seemed to check the scores for our work which we recorded in the workbooks. But whenever we cheated, the workbook would come back with the correct score written in her neat, flowing hand. And when we kept on cheating, we’d be called up front and given a tongue-lashing that flayed us alive. But it was always done in private, out of anybody else’s hearing.

At the beginning of the year she had told me that she would never praise me for reading and spelling—the things I did well—and she never did. Altogether she praised rarely and then only by saying: “That’s quite nice,” or “Better that last week.” But she would bear down on us like an avenging angel if we did not improve or advance in areas that needed strengthening, and especially in areas in which we had potential, such as she saw in me for composition. She was not in the least “child-focused,” indeed not even much interested in children. She was interested in their learning. Yet she knew every child’s name the first day, and every child’s characteristics and above all, his or her strengths, within the first week.

We did not love her—she would have considered that an impudent intrusion on her privacy, I imagine. But we worshipped her. When fifty years later, the Women’s Libbers announced that the Lord is really a woman, I was not a bit surprised. The idea that the Lord might look very much like Miss Elsa—black bombazine, pince-nez, high-button shoes, and all—had occurred to me much earlier, and was by no means altogether displeasing. At least it would be a Lord concerned with the strengths of this miserable sinner, unlike the Lord of whom the preacher talked to us on Sunday in church.

Miss Sophy, by contrast, was entirely child-centered. Children always swarmed all over her. I cannot recall one moment when she did not have a girl or boy sitting in her lap; even the big fifth-graders who so much wanted to be “manly” were not a bit ashamed to cry on her shoulder. But they also came running to her with their joys and triumphs; and Miss Sophy was always ready with a pat, a kiss, a word of encouragement or congratulation. But she never, never remembered the name of a child, even though she had most of them as pupils for five years, for arts and crafts were taught in every grade and she was the only arts and crafts teacher in the school. It was always “Child”—I don’t think, by the way that Miss Sophy knew whether she was talking to a boy or a girl; nor did she care, I imagine. For Miss Sophy held the then quite revolutionary doctrine that boys should know how to sew and cook, and girls should use tools and know how to fix things. Sometimes she ran into parental opposition, as when she asked each mother to send a pair of stockings with holes in them to school so that we could learn how to darn, “to teach coordination between eye and hand,” as she explained. A good many mothers were offended. “We have no stockings with holes in this house,” they would write back. “Fiddlesticks,” Miss Sophy replied, “in a house with a normal nine year old there are always holey stockings.”

It was a altogether quaint idea in the Europe of those days for “good-class” children to learn to use their hands. Art was all right, of course if kept in its place. And girls were supposed to learn sewing and needlework and knitting. But even cooking was not something “good-class” women ever did themselves, if only because no self-respecting cook would stay if the lady of the house so much as set foot in “her” kitchen. And “everybody” had a cook, of course; “lower middle class,” after all, was defined as a family that had no more than two servants. Still, to learn to cook was quite respectable for young women. But shop for girls, or even for that matter for boys—that was carrying things to excess.

For a woman to be handy was actually not too bad. It was eccentric, and that was permissible if one had enough money. No one was greatly scandalized to hear that my mother could and did do home repairs, including a good bit of plumbing and reshingling the roof. And if a man had a “real” hobby, that was all right too—after all, no less than a king of France, Louis XVI, had made and repaired watches (although this probably had something to do with his losing his head). But gentlemen did not work with their hands. One did not go quite so far as the Chinese mandarins, who grew 10 inch-long fingernails to show that they did not degrade themselves with manual work, but the Europe of the nineteenth century came close. I one, as a boy, looked at the suits my grandfather had left behind—he had died in 1899 when my mother was fourteen. There was not one pocket in them except for the waistcoat fob pocket for the watch. “Your grandfather was a gentleman,” my grandmother explained, “and gentlemen twenty years ago had a servant walking behind them, carrying; a gentleman did not use his hands.”

Miss Sophy did not invent her quaint ideas. In fact they had a long though mixed ancestry. They went back to one of the pedagogues of the early nineteenth century, a man by the name of Froebel, father of the kindergarten. Froebel’s ideas of craftwork as part of elementary education got nowhere in Europe; however, they were picked up by those great nonconformists, the Shakers in America. From them, in the mid-nineteenth century, they returned to Europe, to Sweden, where they led to a craft-school movement called, I believe, “Skjoeld.” Miss Sophy had gone there as a young woman for her training. But though she had an impressive Swedish diploma, there was still something subversive in girls using a plane and boys a darning needle.

Yet no one less subversive-looking than tiny Miss Sophy could be imagined. She looked like a baby mouse—a long quivering red nose, a few stiff strays hairs on her upper lip, and tiny, quick, nearsighted button eyes—but a baby mouse modeled by Bernini or some other Baroque sculptor. She was swaddled from top to toe in multi-hued chiffon scarves—lavender, crimson, cerulean, layer upon layer of them—all fluttering wildly even in a hermetically sealed room (and her room was always hermetically sealed and stifling hot, whereas in Miss Elsa’s room every window was wide open even on the coldest days). Out of this cocoon of fluttering chiffon issued a deep, booming bass voice that could be heard over all the noise a hundred children made in school.

Miss Elsa saw each child for a session once a week. In it she discussed last week’s work and next week’s program, working with the child on anything that caused problems, but always after she had first discussed the things the child was doing well and easily. In between these sessions she was always available if a child had a question or an idea for her approval. She also watched. A child in trouble with work would suddenly feel Miss Elsa’s eye on him or her; and when the child looked up, Miss Elsa already knew what the trouble was, and would say: “You forgot to carry forward,” or, “You skipped a page—no wonder you are lost.” Otherwise Miss Elsa left her students alone to do their own work between weekly review and planning sessions.

Miss Sophy would hover over each child, darting from one to the other, sitting down next to each—always on the floor—but rarely staying with any one child more than a few seconds. She taught nonverbally and indeed soundlessly. She would watch for a moment, then put her tiny paw gently over the child’s hand and guide the fingers to the right position to hold a saw or a brush. Or she would take a quick look at whatever the child was trying to draw—a cat, for instance—then take up paper and crayon and draw a purely geometric, nonobjective figure that yet bore all the elements that make a cat a cat: the rounded rear end, the dip in the back just below the neck, the peculiar angle of the head, and the way in which the ears frame the face. Suddenly even as ungifted a draftsman as I was would see “cat” and break out laughing. When that happened, an answering smile appeared on Miss Sophy’s face—the only praise she ever gave, but one that was pure bliss to the beholder.

Many years later I encountered another great teacher who worked the same way. Karl Knaats, the painter, taught at Bennington during the mid-forties for two years. In those entire two years no one heard him say a word. He would stand over a student and grunt—”humpf, humpf, humpf, brrr”—and the student would turn around with the same smile of instant elightenment Miss Sophy’s students had had and the same complete change in performance.

But unlike Karl Knaats, Miss Sophy could, and did, talk. And her short lapidary sentences, shouted basso-profundo, put across sudden insights. “Don’t draw dogs, they are stooooopid,” she would boom, “draw cats. There has never been a good portrait of a stooooopid person.” Of course, there are the Velasquez and Goya portraits of the Habsburg and Bourbon kings and queens of Spain to prove her wrong. But they are the exceptions, as a visit to any museum will show. Or: “The hardest thing to do in carpentry it to make drawers; they hide things.”

Miss Elsa was the very perfection of the Socratic method. But Miss Sophy was a Zen master. Yet I did not learn from either of them what I knew I needed to learn and what they set out to teach me: neither to write a legible hand nor to use hand tools, even poorly.

When I started out on the milking stool for my mother that Miss Sophy thought I might be able to do, she did the seat and the holes for the legs. Then she took my hands and led them over the legs of a stool, making me feel the angle at which the legs have to be cut at a stool, making me feel the angle at which the legs have to be cut at one end so they will stand straight on the other. She had me practice on a few rods, then showed me how to set up the mitre box to cut the legs, and we measured them together. But when I sawed, following, I thought, so carefully the marks we had made together, I came out with three legs, each a different length—one 17 inches as it was supposed to be, the second 19 1/2, and the third 14. “All right,” I said to myself, “Mother will have to get dwarf cows,” and proceed to cut all the legs down to 14 inches. But alas I again had three legs of different lengths. And so it went until I had nothing but stumps—still of different lengths.

Miss Sophy never scolded, never criticized. When she was truly horrified, she would sit down next to the miscreant, gently take one of his hands between hers, and begin to shake her head. She had an enormous mass of iron-gray hair piled every which way on top of her head and held together by millions—or so it seemed—of hairpins stuck in at random. As she shook her head, the hairpins would begin to all out and then, as the head-shaking became more vigorous, fly all over the room. And the hair would come cascading down. Then the children would begin to laugh until they rolled helplessly on the floor. Finally Miss Sophy would join in the laughter and everyone would scramble to pick up hairpins, to pile the hair back up on her head, and to put the hairpins back in the same crazy random fashion. The offender would go back to work—and usually do a good, or at least a better job. But not I. I tried twice, and both times came out with three legs of different lengths. Twice I went back to work. But when I came out a third time with three uneven legs measuring roughly 5, 7, and 9 inches respectively, each cut to a different bias, Miss Sophy did not shake her head. Instead she sat and looked at my handiwork a long time. Then she turned to me and said—for once in a quiet, funereal voice—”What kind of pen does your mother use?” “A fountain pen,” I said. “Are you sure,” Miss Sophy asked, “that she never uses a steel nib?” “Positive,” I answered; “she hates them.” “Good,” said Miss Sophy, “then we can have you make a pen wiper. She’ll never have to use it.” And for years thereafter my mother kept on her desk, unused, a penwiper of my manufacture, made of the tail feathers of a rooster precariously held together by flower wire. Both Mother and I knew that I had reached the limit of my abilities as a craftsman. So did Miss Sophy.

But Miss Elisa was made of different stuff. When it became clear that my handwriting was not improving, she called in my father. In my presence—for she never talked to a parent unless the child was present—she said: “I have sad news for you. I know that the main reason why you took Peter out of public school and enrolled him here was his poor handwriting. It’s not improving—I’m afraid it never will. Therefore I propose that you have him apply for immediate admission to the Gymnasium.” This was rather stunning. It was possible to apply for the entrance examination to the Gymnasium after the fourth grade, but this was skipping a grade and exceptional reward for superior performance. “I don’t understand,” said my father. “It’s quite simple,” said Miss Elsa. “The one thing he needs to learn, he isn’t going to learn; so what’s the use his wasting a year in the fifth grade when his handwriting isn’t going to get any better? I know, “she said, “he is young for the Gymnasium. But he was born in November and they take them as long as they were born before December. He will pass the entrance examination—it tests mainly reading and arithmetic, and Peter is fully up to their standards. But,” she went on, “the main reason why I tell you to have Peter go straight into the Gymnasium is that I won’t have him upset my sister Clara. Her health isn’t good and she is a worrier. She won’t be able to do a thing about Peter’s horrible handwriting—I’m twice the teacher she is and I got nowhere. It will frustrate and upset her, and all to no purpose.”

My father argued. But Miss Elsa won, and I became the youngest student in the first grade of the Gymnasium the autumn of that year.

My father, however, had not given up. A few years later—my handwriting getting steadily worse instead of better—he took me to a handwriting school for an intensive course. Mr. Feldman, the handwriting master, lived in a dreary side street in the inner city. Downstairs he had a window display that showed a great number of samples saying: “This is how I wrote before I took Mr. Feldman’s calligraphy course” in writing every bit as dreadful as mine. Next to each, in beautiful Spencerian hand or elaborate clerical curlicue, was another sample, signed with the same name, saying: “This is how I write now that I have taken Mr. Feldman’s course.” In my father’s presence, Mr. Feldman had me write: “This is how I write now that I have taken Mr. Feldman’s course.” When I had written a sample good enough to be put in the window downstairs next to my “before” sample, the course was over. After that, even my father gave up.

In the Gymnasium I did not encounter a single one of the sadists and tyrants who, since the days of Dickens, have become standard figures in the schoolday memories of European literary people. But very few of the teachers I had in my eight years in a famous classical Gymnasium—the school which a popular American myth tends to enshrine in the holiest of holies—were of even low-level competence. Most bored their students most of the time and themselves all of the time.

At that they were not a bit different from the teachers I had encountered in my first three years of school before the one year under Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy. Nor were they any different from most of the teachers I later encountered in my university days. Indeed the only good teachers under whom I have worked, except in fourth grade, were two early bosses _first the managing editor of a German afternoon paper and then a wise old merchant banker in London. And most of the teachers I have seen as my colleagues on university faculties since I myself began to teach when barely twenty, have been no better than the teachers under whom I survived in the Gymnasium; the majority ranged from dismal to barely adequate.

But I had been spoiled by the one year under Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy. Or it might be more accurate to say that I had become incurably infected.

I might have gotten into teaching anyhow—there were long years during which I needed a job and an income and could not be choosy. I might have discovered that I liked teaching and am apparently quite good at it. It’s unlikely, though; none of the other jobs that I took because I needed money—merchant banking, for instance—turned out to be more than a way to earn a living. But because of Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy I knew that teaching could be something quite different from what it was to the poor drudges who suffered such dreadful boredom while trying to make us learn Latin grammar, the Greek dramatists, or world history. The subjects, I found to my surprise, were not boring at all. Indeed I have not found a subject yet that is not sparkling with interest, and I have taught dozens of subjects, all over the humanities and social sciences, from theology and philosophy through literature and history to government, management, economics, and statistics. I must admit that I did not particularly enjoy Latin—and we had it for two hours each day six days a week. I found it disconcertingly easy and disconcertingly empty. But Greek I thought elegant; yet what a bore the schoolmasters made it to be. The reason was that the poor devils were so dreadfully bored themselves because they were such awful teachers, or because their students were such awful learners. And then I would see Miss Elsa or Miss Sophy in my mind’s eyes. Long division, I was quite sure, could not be a less boring subject in itself than Roman history, indeed it was obviously far less stimulating. Yet Miss Elsa was interested, never bored, and made it interesting. So did Miss Sophy when she showed me how to hold a hammer to get a nail is straight, even though I never mastered it.

Without Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy in my memory, I would have resisted teaching myself. Perhaps I would not have minded too much boring others; that is a risk every professional writer takes without thinking twice about it. But I would have hesitated to take the risk of boring myself—and that is what my Gymnasium teachers so obviously did.

Of course I did not think these thoughts consciously until much later. I felt them. But I also knew quite early, and consciously what I had learned from Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, and that it was more important than what they had failed to teach me, and superior to anything the Gymnasium tried to teach me. To be sure, even Miss Sophy could not make a craftsman out of me, just as the greatest music teacher cannot make a musician out of someone who is tone deaf. But I took from her a lifelong appreciation of craftsmanship, and enjoyment of honest clean work, and respect for the task. My fingers have never forgotten the feel of well-planed and sanded wood, cut with rather than against the grain, which Miss Sophy—her hand on mine and guiding my fingers—made me sense. And Miss Elsa had given me a work discipline and the knowledge of how one organizes for performance, though I abused this skill for years. It enabled me to do absolutely no work in the Gymnasium for eight or nine months of the year, during which I pursued my own interests, whatever they were. Then when my teachers were sure that I would at least have to repeat the year, if not be thrown out altogether, I would dust off Miss Elsa’s workbooks, set goals, and organize—and I would end the year in the upper third or quarter of the class simply by doing a little work for a few weeks in a purposeful, goal-directed fashion. This is how I till got my law doctorate when I was twenty-one or twenty-two. By that time I was working full time as a senior editor of a newspaper, and had been working full time since the day I graduated from the Gymnasium. I had attended practically no classes though I was already teaching in some law-school subjects of the doctoral examination—the typical law-school subjects such as contract, criminal law, or procedure—held very little interest for me. But Miss Elsa’s workbook, work plans, and performance sheets were as effective in preparing myself for a grueling three-day oral and/or writing a dissertation as they had been fro planning compositions a month ahead in fourth grade.

Finally, Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy taught me that teaching and learning, of high quality and with a high level of intensity and enjoyment, are possible. These two women set standards and they gave examples.

I did not encounter another real teacher until two or three years later. By that time I had almost come to accept the unanimous belief of my classmates, shared by their parents and incidentally by the great majority of students all the world over, that school has to be a bore and teachers have to be incompetent. I had not forgotten Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, but they were becoming fairy tale figures in my mind.

Then I had the good fortune to encounter Artur Schnabel. He was never of course my teacher; he taught only advanced pianists of great professional promise. And I only met him once, for two short hours, when—as a result of a mixup in his schedule—I was permitted to sit in while he gave a lesson to a classmate’s sister who was a musical prodigy and had already made her professional debut. Schnabel in those years, the early 1920s, was not yet the famous pianist he was to become later, especially after he moved to the United States following Hitler’s advent to power in Germany. Indeed in his native Vienna—which he soon thereafter left for Berlin—he was considered far too “austere.” But he had already established himself as a master piano teacher.

The first hour of the lesson seemed conventional enough. Schnabel first had my friend’s sister play the pieces he had assigned her during the last lesson a month earlier. As I remember it, it was a Mozart sonata and a Schubert sonata. The young woman—she was perhaps fourteen or so—played with what I even at age twelve, realized was remarkable technique. (She has since become known for her technical proficiency.) Schnabel said nice things about her technique, had her play one phrase over again, and asked questions about another phrase. He wondered whether she might not try playing a passage a little more slowly or with a little more emphasis. But none of this was too different from the way my own totally undistinguished piano teacher taught me.

Schnabel pulled out her assignments for the next lesson, a month hence, and had her sight-read them. Again the technical competence of the young woman was noticeable. Schnabel remarked on it too. Then, however, he went back to the two pieces she had practiced the month before and played earlier. “You know, my dear Lilly,” he said, “you played those two pieces very well indeed. But you did not play what you heard. You played what you think you should have heard, and that is faking. And if I heard it, an audience will hear it too.” Lilly looked at him, totally baffled. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Schnabel. “I will play the Andante of the Schubert sonata the way I hear it. I cannot play it the way you hear it. And I don’t want to play it as you played it, because no one hears it that way. You listen to what I hear, and then I think you may hear.”

He sat down at the piano and played the Schubert Andante the way he heard it. Suddenly Lilly heard. Suddenly she had that same smile of enlightenment I had seen on the faces of Miss Sophy’s students. At that moment Schnabel stopped and said, “And now you play.” She played the piece with far less competent technique than before, far more like the child she still was, more naively—but convincingly. And then I heard it too—at least I must have had the same smile on my face. For Schnabel turned to me and said, “Do you hear it? That’s good. As long as you play what you hear, you play music.”

I never heard well enough to be a musician. But I suddenly perceived that I myself would always learn by looking for performance. I suddenly realized that the right method, at least for me, was to look for the thing that worked and for the people who perform. I realized that I, at least, do not learn from mistakes. I have to learn from successes.

It took me many years to realize that I had stumbled upon a method. Perhaps I did not fully understand this until, years later, I read—I believe in one of Martin Buber’s early books—the saying of the wise rabbi of the first century: “The Good Lord has so created Man that everyone can make every conceivable mistake on his own. Don’t ever try to learn from other people’s mistakes. Learn what other people do right.”

Since the moment of enlightenment in a corner of Schnabel’s studio, I have been looking for teachers who teach. I have been going out of my way to find them, to observe them, to enjoy them. Whenever I hear of somebody who has a reputation as a master teacher, I try to sneak into his or her classes or lectures, to listen, and to watch. And if I cannot do this, I try at least to find out from students what the teacher did and what worked.

“Teacher-watching” has been one of my main enjoyments over the years. I can recommend it as a spectator sport that never ceases to hold surprises. I am still at it.

One of the things I learned very early is that students always recognize a good teacher. They may be over impressed by second-raters who only talk a good game, who are witty and entertaining, or who have reputations as scholars, without being particularly good teachers. But I have hot come across a single first-rate teacher who was not recognized as such by the students. The first-rate teacher is often not “popular”; in fact, popularity has little to do with impact as a teacher. But when students say about a teacher, “We are learning a great deal,” they can be trusted. They know.

But I also learned that “teacher” is an elusive term. Or rather, I learned that there is no one answer to the question: What makes the effective teacher? No two teachers, I found, do the same things. No two teachers behave the same way. What works for one teacher and makes him first-rate does not seem to work at all for another one—or is never used by another one. It was all very confusing—and still is.

There are the nonverbal teachers, the teachers who teach the way Miss Sophy had taught. Artur Schnabel was a nonverbal teacher. Tow other great music teachers of the same generation were strongly verbal. Rosa Lhevinne, who for fifty years was the most effective teacher of pianists in America, taught primarily by talking and rarely by example. So did Lotte Lehmann, the Austrian soprano, who in her old age became a great singing teacher in America.

Of two fine teachers of surgery I have watched, one taught nonverbally. He stood behind the Chief Resident, who was about to perform a major surgical operation, and did not say one word during the entire procedure. But at every move the Chief Resident looked at him, and the surgeon would nod, shake his head, lift a hand ever so slightly, raise an eyebrow; every one of the students in the amphitheater knew by intuition what each signal meant, and so did the Chief Resident. Another surgery teacher of great renown rehearsed the operation in the minutest detail before the patient was wheeled into the operating room. During the operation, he expected to be asked questions and to give answers. Both have taught many successful surgeons. I once mentioned this to a friend on mine, himself known to be a good teacher of surgeons. He laughed and said, “You might be describing Dr. De Bakey and Dr. Denton Cooley, the two Houston heart surgeons who are also great teachers. The fact that one is nonverbal and the other teaches through the spoken word is, I think, one reason why the two men cannot get along. You know,” he added, “I’m not old enough to have been a student of Dr. Cushing’s at Harvard. But when I trained there, his memory was still green. And he was one of your totally nonverbal teachers, I was told. I myself, incidentally, teach through the word—sometimes I wish I could teach without it.”

There are some teachers who do best with advanced students and others who do best with beginners. Two of the great physicists of this century were apparently great teachers: Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Enrico Fermi, particularly in his last years when he taught in Chicago. But Bohr taught only the “master class.” I am told that physics students, even gifted ones, found him almost inaccessible and got little out of his lectures and seminars though he prepared for them meticulously. But practically every one of the great men of the second generation of modern physics—from Heisenberg to Schroedinger and Oppenheimer—did his postgraduate work under Bohr and credited Bohr with his own unfolding as a scientist. Enrico Fermi, by contrast, did his best teaching with undergraduates, especially freshmen, and most especially with students who had no intention of going into physics and never had taken a physics course before. Martha Graham, the modern dancer and a teacher of extraordinary power, was equally effective with both beginners and masters, and taught both exactly the same way.

Some teachers are best in front of a large group, lecturing. Buckminster Fuller holds an audience of 2,000 people in rapt attention for seven hours. Other teachers do their best work with small groups—Lotte Lehmann was apparently one. There are some, like Mark Hopkins, who are effective with an individual. At least the old epigram asserts that the best school would be “Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and one student at the other,” though I personally have never seen a teacher who really performs before an audience of one. Good teachers are showmen, and showmen need an audience. Some teach through the written word rather than the spoken one. This was true of both General George Marshall, the U.S. chief of Staff in World War II, and of Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors. Sloan’s letters, some of which have been reprinted in his book, My Years with General Motors, are masterpieces of teaching through the written word. And of course the greatest teacher of the Christian tradition, St. Paul, taught best through the epistle.

There seems to be little correlation between ability as a performer and ability as a teacher, and none between scholarship and teaching, or craftsmanship and teaching. Of all the great painters of the European tradition, only one—Tintoretto—was, it seems, any good as a teacher; he taught El Greco. Rubens had many students, but not one of them became even a good second-rate painter himself. And all the great painters, with the single exception of El Greco, were the students of little-known and undistinguished painters who were teachers. Robert Oppenheimer, however good an administrator, was not among the great men of the age of relativity, quantum physics, and atomic physics. But he was a born teacher, who released the creative energies of a whole generation of young American physicists and kindled in them the spark of greatness. Even for a complete ignoramus like myself, to sit and listen to his advanced Princeton lectures was to glimpse vast vistas, seas, and mountain ranges. The one great teacher of musicians in the Vienna of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven was Diabelli, whose musical legacy consists of the most boring of five-finger exercises. And in the next generation it was not Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, or for that matter Liszt or Berlioz, who by all accounts was the greatest teacher of piano ever.

Teachers, my “teacher-watching” led me to conclude early, have no pattern and no one right method. Teaching is a gift. One is born with it, the way the Beethovens and Rubens and Einsteins were born with their gifts. Teaching is personality, rather than skill or practice.

But slowly, over the years, I found another kind of teacher. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that I found people who produce learning. They do it, no by being “teachers”—that is, not by gift of personality. They do it through a method that guides the student to learning. Each of these people does what Miss Elsa had done in fourth grade. They find the strengths of the individual student and set goals to develop those strengths. They set both long-range goals and short-range ones. Only then do they concern themselves with the student’s weaknesses, which emerge as limitations on the full exercise of the student’s strengths. They make sure that students get the feedback from their own performance, so they can exercise self-control and direct themselves. These people praise rather than criticize. But they use praise so sparingly that it never loses its capacity to stimulate, and never replaces the satisfaction and pride of achievement as the student’s main reward. They do no “teach”; they program the student for effective learning. And those who do this can work with any student because they always work with the individual, even in a large group. In both kinds, teaching is not a function of subject knowledge or of “communications skill.” It is a separate quality. For the teachers—the Miss Sophys—teaching is a dimension of the personality. For the guides to learning—the Miss Elsas—learning is a method.

In their results, the two approaches are very much the same. The end product of teaching is, after all, not what happens to the teacher but the learning of the student. And both methods produce learning.

I became fully conscious of this only years after I had first begun to watch teachers, when in 1942 I joined the faculty of Bennington college, then a small liberal arts women’s school in New England. Bennington had been founded ten years earlier as an experimental college that never wanted to be large but aimed at being important. It came close to realizing this ambition for a few short years in the 1940s under the presidency of Lewis Webster Jones, who had taught economics at Bennington and had then become its president in 1941. (He moved on to the presidency of the University of Arkansas in 1946, and from there to the presidency of Rutgers University in New Jersey.) Jones recruited people with great reputations—Martha Graham in the modern dance; Erich Fromm, the psychologist; Richard Neutra, the architect. But what particularly concerned him was not reputation but teaching and learning. He succeeded in building and holding together, for a few short years, a teaching faculty of remarkable performance. It was a small faculty, no more than forty-five all told. Very few of them were not competent as teachers; the less competent did not last long while Lewis Jones was president. But fully twelve to fifteen were teachers of extraordinary performance and impact, which is a far greater proportion than I have ever heard of or seen elsewhere—and they had almost more impact than the students could absorb.

The “teachers” were as varied a lot as teachers usually are. Erich Fromm, for instance, was a truly magnificent teacher of small groups, who did indifferently with the individual student and poorly with a large class in a lecture hall. Richard Neutra was misplaced at Bennington. He was a great teacher of architects and a poor teacher of architectural amateurs such as a liberal arts college has to offer. After a few years he left, frustrated, to return to the practice of architecture.

But there was another large group who were not “master teachers” and yet produced what I can only call “master students.” A fair number of faculty members knew how to guide a student to learning, and had the methods of the pedagogue. Typical of them was “the other Martha,” Martha Hill, who also taught modern dance. Unlike Martha Graham, she was not a great dancer herself. She had no magnetism to her personality and did not dominate a class through sheer power as Martha Graham did. One hardly noticed her in a group. Yet her students learned as much as they learned from Martha Graham, and perhaps more. And they were as convinced of her ability as a teacher as the students of that great “master teacher,” Martha Graham.

What Martha Hill applied was method. She did exactly what Miss Elsa had done in fourth grade. She watched students for a few days or weeks, thought through what each of them could do and what each of them should do. She worked out a program for each, which the student herself then ran and she only monitored. And she pushed and pushed and pushed students to do better what they already did well. She was always friendly, yet did not praise much. But she made sure that students knew when they had done a good job.

Then there was the man whom most Bennington students rightly considered the outstanding teacher on the faculty, Francis Ferguson. Himself a distinguished Dante scholar, Ferguson was not a “teacher” at all. He was a programmer of learning. But students came out of his classes with stars of excitement in their eyes, not over anything Ferguson had said or done but over what they had been induced to say or do. And very much the same method was followed by another highly effective pedagogue, Hertha Moselsio—a big German woman who ran the pottery studio—who insisted on absolutely scrupulous workmanship, and who demanded of students that they do better what they could do well.

There are two different breeds. There is the teacher who has a gift in his keeping. And there is the pedagogue who knows how to program learning in the student Teachers are born, and the born teacher can then improve and become better. But pedagogues have a method that can be learned, probably by almost everybody. Indeed, the “born” teacher an become a great teacher most easily by adding to his gift the method of the pedagogue. Then he will also become a universal teacher, able to teach large groups and small groups, beginners and the “master class.”

Miss Sophy had charisma; Miss Elsa had method. Miss Sophy gave enlightenment; Miss Elsa gave skills. Miss Sophy conveyed vision, Miss Elsa guided learning. Miss Sophy was a teacher, Miss Elsa was a pedagogue. This distinction would not have surprised Socrates, or indeed any of the ancient Greeks. Socrates is traditionally called a great teacher. He himself would have resented this as an insult. He never spoke of himself as a teacher. He was a “pedagogue”—a guide to the learner. The Socratic method is not a teaching method, it is a learning method. It is programmed learning. Indeed Socrates’ criticism of the Sophists was precisely that they emphasized teaching and that they believed that one teaches a subject. This he thought idle and vanity. The teacher teaches learning; the student learns the subject. Learning is fruitful; teaching is pretentious and a fraud. And it was for this that the Oracle at Delphy called him the “wisest man in Greece.” For almost 2,000 years, however, the Sophists have ruled—the ones who promise to be able to teach teaching. Their ultimate triumph is the blind belief of American higher education that the Ph.D., or advanced specialized subject knowledge, is the right (indeed the only) preparation for teaching. But the Sophists have ruled only in the West. Other civilizations never accepted the Western, the Sophist, idea of the teacher. The Indian word for teacher is “guru” and a guru clearly is not made but born. He has an authority which is not that of the college course, but of the spirit. Similarly, the Japanese Sensei is a “master” rather than a teacher. But in the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

It is only in this century that we are rediscovering what Socrates knew. We are doing so because we have done more serious work and research on learning in the last 100 years than has ever been done before. We have rediscovered that learning is built into every one of us. We have rediscovered that the human being—and all living beings —are “learning organisms” who are “programmed” to learn. We do not yet know as much about learning, as a result of a century of research, as Miss Elsa perceived. But we know that what she knew and did are right and available to practically everyone.

For 2,000 years or so, since the days of Socrates, we have debated whether teaching and learning are “cognitive” or “behavioral.” It is a sham battle. Teaching and learning are both. But they are also something else: they are passion. Teachers start out with passion. Pedagogues acquire it as they become intoxicated with the enlightenment of the student. For the smile of learning on the student’s face is more addictive than any drug or narcotic. It is this passion that prevents that deadly and deadening disease of the classroom, the boredom of the teacher—the one condition that absolutely inhibits both teaching and learning. Teaching and learning are the Platonic Eros, the Eros of the Symposium. There is in each of us Plato’s Winged Horse, the noble steed which seeks the mate it can only find through teaching or learning. For the teacher, the passion is inside the student. But teaching and learning are always passion, passion one is born with or passion to which one becomes addicted.

One more thing teacher and pedagogue have in common: they hold themselves accountable.

After World War II, I learned that Miss Elsa was still alive and destitute. I sent her a few CARE packages with a carefully typed letter. Only the signature was in my handwriting. Back, a few weeks later, came her reply in the same beautiful flowing script which I had admired so much as a ten year old, and which neither age nor adversity had marred. “You must be the same Peter Drucker,” she wrote, “who was one of my few failures in the classroom. You did not learn from me.” There are no poor or stupid or lazy students for the real teacher and the real pedagogue. There are only good teachers and poor teachers.

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